


Fire on the River

by lirin



Category: Jurassic Park (1993), Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-02 07:17:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21157754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: Conrad had shown up at Weaver's door three weeks ago, and now they were here, diving away from the beak of a giant ostrich with Kong nowhere in sight. But if they couldn't find Kong, that was good, right? Or did that mean the others had already found him?





	Fire on the River

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).

The trees nearby were smashing to the ground as some monster drew slowly closer and closer. With a sheer stone cliff rising behind them, there was nowhere to go. They could stay here, or they could rush the unseen creature. All in all, Weaver would have preferred to rush it (and perhaps manage to miss it all together depending on its size), but Conrad seemed inclined to remain by the cliff face, and he knew more about combat than she did, so she wasn't inclined to run away from him. She raised her pistol—she'd made sure to bring a gun this time, now that she knew what they were likely to encounter—and waited. Beside her, Conrad was kindling a fire with his rifle slung over his shoulder, but she felt sure he'd have it ready to shoot in an instant, once the creature appeared.

"Maybe we'll be lucky and it'll be Kong," Weaver said.

"It's not Kong," Conrad said. "It weighs less and is lower to the ground. But maybe we'll be half as lucky and whatever it is will attract Kong's attention."

"So be flashy and loud when we're fighting it?"

"No, because we'd be much more likely to be unlucky enough to capture the attention of every single other living being on this island _except_ for Kong." Fire kindled, Conrad stood up and handed her a flaming brand. "Fire will scare some creatures off. Try this first, and only shoot if that doesn't seem to work."

"You should have brought guns with silencers," Weaver said. "Wave it or throw it?"

"Whichever seems more likely to work. And try not to set the forest on fire. It _might_ be noticed. And I don't think Kong would like it."

"Do you think he's still here?"

Conrad didn't answer. "Ready—"

Some sort of humongous avian burst its way through the trees, like a squat short-necked ostrich several times as big as it ought to be. Weaver brandished her flaming branch. The giant ostrich didn't change course, still making right for them slowly but steadily. Weaver moved out of its path to the left, while Conrad went right. "Do you think it can fly?" she called.

"Set its wings on fire so we don't have to find out," he replied.

Weaver hesitated for a moment—the bird hadn't touched them, maybe it hadn't noticed them and just liked this cliff face—and then its beak darted to the earth, nearly seizing Conrad, who dove to the ground. Weaver immediately hurled the branch at the bulk of the bird's body and, now with no other weapons, readied her gun. For a moment, nothing happened; and then its beak was hurtling at her. Weaver jumped and rolled further to the left, drawing it away from Conrad if nothing else, and fired wildly towards its center of mass as she tumbled. Behind her, two more gunshots cracked. "Aim for its eyes!" Conrad yelled.

Weaver rolled back over. The creature's wing was smoldering and its head was bloodied. The eyes were a difficult target with the way its head was moving around so wildly, but Weaver aimed as best she could and fired two more times. She pressed herself back against the cliff wall.

There wasn't much space between the cliff behind her and the forest beyond. She could make a break for it, but the creature might follow her there, and running headlong through a Skull Island forest was an activity to be avoided at all costs. She was too far away from Conrad's fire now to use it for further defense, though with the amount they'd been shooting it wasn't as if keeping quiet would do them any good at this point. If they were heard, then they were heard. Might as well keep shooting. She emptied the rest of her magazine into the bird's swinging head, and reached for a fresh magazine from her belt.

In too much of a hurry, she fumbled twice at the pouch, then caught the magazine against the edge of the grip before it finally slid into place. She'd heard several shots, but the bird hadn't come near her the whole time she was reloading. She looked up to see it moving back, towards the forest.

"I think it's blinded, at least," Conrad said, stomping out the few remains of the fire that he hadn't thrown at the creature. "Let's get out of here before it decides what it wants to do next."

"Do you want to keep heading west?"

"The cliff has to flatten out eventually."

They ran at first, until the incapacitated creature was well behind them. Then they slowed to a fast walk, guns still at the ready and eyes peeled for whatever creatures Skull Island would throw at them next. Above them, the rock cliff grew shorter and shorter until finally it petered out into a grassy slope. They climbed up the slope and headed east again, but this time at the top of the slowly rising cliff instead of below it.

"Stay away from the edges and keep down," Conrad said.

"And what about if birds that can actually fly see us from above?"

"We'll hope they don't," he said. "I haven't seen anything that high in the sky, but if one does show up, shoot first and ask questions later. The sound will be audible at a greater distance up here, but if you need to shoot, then do it." Weaver raised an eyebrow, and he added, "Yes, I know, we should have bought silencers."

"You're the one who put this expedition together, such as it is," Weaver returned. "I don't think there's any 'we' about it."

"And for a two-person expedition on a shoestring budget thrown together far ahead of the time I expected it to need to take place, it's not a half bad expedition," Conrad said. "One hundred percent of the participants are still alive after twelve hours; that's much better than previous records."

Weaver nodded. "If we can actually manage to get one hundred percent of the participants back off of the island, that'll be even better."

They continued on in silence. After a while, the grassy slope became steeper and rockier. As they neared the peak, the flat areas receded and they had to clamber over the rocks.

"Their camp is to the southwest," Conrad said. "I think Kong has to be north of here, or either we would have seen him or he'd have already been found."

"Or they _have_ found him and we just don't know it," Weaver said.

"Yes," Conrad said. "Or he died a decade ago and the island no longer has a king. But let's not worry about the possibilities we can't control until we've dealt with all the possibilities we can." He led the way across and among the boulders to the north side of the ridge. "We don't have time to go much further before dark. This is probably as safe a place to camp as any. If we find an overhang, we won't be visible from above or below. We'll keep watch for Kong until it gets dark, and then sleep in watches. You can take first or second, I don't care."

Weaver knelt next to him at the edge of the ridge and adjusted the focus on her binoculars. "Maybe Kong's realized that there are intruders on his island and he's staying out of their sight on purpose."

"We can hope so," Conrad said. "If that's so, perhaps he doesn't even need whatever warning we might manage to give him."

"You don't really think he's dead, do you?"

"The island doesn't seem leaderless," Conrad mused, gazing out at the land around them through his own binoculars. "If it had lost its king, I would have expected to find more anarchy. All the creatures we've seen seem to be acting normally enough—well, normal for Skull Island. No, I think Kong's still here, and the island is still thriving under his rule."

"If the island loses Kong, it's all over," Weaver murmured. That was what he'd said three weeks ago, when he'd shown up at her door.

It had been a Saturday evening, and she'd spent all afternoon developing photos. She'd hardly recognized Conrad at first. Whatever he'd spent the past two decades doing, he hadn't had an easy life. But then, he'd never been the sort of person to be capable of having an easy life. "Are you still with Monarch?" she'd asked. "Because I already told them the last six times they asked: I won't spill their secrets, but I won't do their dirty work either."

He'd pushed his way inside her apartment and wandered towards the kitchen. "Hardly," he called back to her. "I lasted scarcely two years after you did."

She followed him into the kitchen. "Did they kick you out or did you kick yourself out?"

He shrugged. "The feeling was mutual. They'd grown too political, and too few of the people who worked there believed that the monsters we were searching for actually existed." He turned around from his examination of the contents of her refrigerator and looked her in the eye. "After all, it's a difficult thing to believe, isn't it? Unless you've experienced what we've experienced."

"So what have you been doing since you left?"

"A little of this, a little of that. Odd jobs. No uncharted islands, nothing larger than life."

"One would think you'd find it rather boring."

"There was still plenty of action, just not the sort that made me feel like a mouse in a world too big for me. But it's not the jobs I've been doing that I've come to talk to you about; it's the one I turned down." Finally finding the beer that she'd shoved to the back of the fridge for a rainy day, he handed her a bottle and opened the other for himself.

Weaver clinked their bottles together. "I assume the objection was something more complicated than just that they weren't paying enough or that Monarch asked you for the dozenth time to come back and work for them."

He nodded. "Have you heard of Jurassic Park?"

"Yeah, it was an amusement park that never got off the ground," Weaver said. "In Central America. There were some rumored claims about bioengineering, but considering the so-called dinosaurs never materialized, most people have figured that it was all just pie in the sky nonsense." She looked at him more closely. "So what, they offered you a job on this island of maybe-dinosaurs? I can see why you turned that down."

"It wasn't InGen, the ones who owned Jurassic Park; it was their competitor, Biosyn. Dodgson—that's the man who contacted me—he wrapped it up in nice words all right, but he was looking for someone to do a bit of light corporate espionage in a dangerous setting. Back when Brooks and Randa came to me for the Skull Island venture, I realized there was something they weren't saying, and when I saw the fully-armed expedition we were mounting, I knew there was even more that wasn't being said. But back then, I was a bit more open to jumping into situations out of curiosity. Now, I have my limits, and inaccessible islands with who-knows-what on them are one of those limits. As soon as it became clear that's what Dodgson was leading up to, I bowed out. But I got curious. I kept an ear out for Isla Nublar, and when the Jurassic Park news dropped, I started asking questions."

"And what were the answers?"

He sat down on one of the bar stools at the kitchen island, crossed his arms, and leaned forward. "That's just it. There weren't any. Nobody who actually knows anything is talking about Jurassic Park. But if you look them in the eye when you ask, their eyes tell a different story. They're scared." He took a swig of beer. "And they probably signed fistfulls of NDAs; InGen's got enough money to field stables of lawyers. Or at least, they had."

"And Biosyn?"

"They've still got money. And even less morals than InGen had, to hear my sources talk. Enough money to bribe someone at Monarch, I think. Dodgson didn't come to me by coincidence. I believe he's learned of Monarch's existence, somehow, and he was trying to find a way in. If they're already dabbling with dinosaurs, then Skull Island will appeal to them, too."

"Kong—"

"They'll experiment on him. They'll steal his blood, his DNA. They've got all these sophisticated cloning techniques these days. After whatever happened at Isla Nublar, InGen lost a lot of personnel, and Biosyn hired quite a few of them. At least one of them, a man named Wu, seems to have been working at the Jurassic Park facility almost exclusively. If they were indeed cloning dinosaurs, then he knows how to do it. And although I don't know for certain, by this point we have to assume that Biosyn knows where Skull Island is and is headed its way. We need to save Kong. Or warn him, or whatever we can do."

Weaver slammed her beer bottle down on the counter. "Don't you remember the day we landed back on the ship after the refueling team picked us up? When we all swore we'd never go back to Skull Island? That it had only been luck that we hadn't all died there, and that none of us were going to test our luck a second time? What the _hell_ makes you think I'm going to change my mind when you haven't even spoken to me in years? Let the expedition go to Skull Island on their own, they'll all just get killed by the Skullcrawlers if the other monsters don't get to them first. Kong will be fine. He'll be fine."

"And what if he isn't?" Conrad said. "Kong's the only one left of his kind to look after Skull Island. If the island loses Kong, it's all over. You know that. We saw what the ecosystem there was like. It may have defended itself well enough against Randa's expedition, but I don't know if it's strong enough if a team of bioengineers brings their knowledge of dinosaurs to the situation."

"I'm not going," she said. "You'll have to find somebody else."

"You'll change your mind," he said. "And besides, this time we'll know what we're up against, and we'll prepare accordingly."

She _had_ changed her mind, eventually, after several more days of intermittent arguing. But knowing what they were up against was no great comfort, and now that they were here, she wasn't sure how much they really had know what they were up against. They hadn't seen any of those ostrich creatures on their last trip here. How many other creatures remained to be found in the depths of Skull Island? And how many of those creatures would be perfectly happy to kill them?

Probably all of them.

"It's getting dark enough, we can go ahead and make camp," Conrad said. "We're not going to see Kong tonight."

"And if we don't find him in the morning, either?"

"We'll just have to take matters into our own hands."

Weaver nodded, slowly. They'd come too far to stop now. "What did you have in mind? Fire or grenades?"

"Fire," he said promptly. "I'd rather it appeared to be an accident, or perhaps they'll assume one of the creatures on this island breathes fire. I wouldn't put it past them to exist, honestly. But if the Biosyn expedition didn't hear us fighting that avian, I'd rather have them continue to think they're the only humans on this island."

As the sun rose the next morning, Kong still had not put in an appearance. Weaver and Conrad lingered over their breakfast, but when that was done they could wait no longer. They hiked east to the base of the ridge, then turned southwest to head for the Biosyn camp.

The camp was right on the river, but they hadn't brought a boat, thinking it too visible. So instead they took the long, treacherous hike, first towards the river and then south along its banks. The closer they came to the river, the more the flora and fauna were familiar from their previous visit. It probably wasn't that knowledge that protected them, so much as sheer dumb luck—but regardless, they neared the camp without being attacked by any more creatures. The sun was setting by the time they finally arrived, so they made camp again, quietly and without a fire.

In the morning, they crept forward and watched as the camp emptied itself. The plentiful armed guards seemed more interested in staying close to the scientists and whatever they were investigating along the riverbank than in leaving anyone in the camp itself. By mid-morning, the entire party had moved far enough away from the camp that Conrad deemed it safe to move in. They kindled a small fire inside one of the tents, where it would not be visible, and used brands from that fire to set the other tents alight.

"For Kong," Weaver whispered as the fire took hold.

"For Kong," Conrad murmured behind her. The flames crept higher and they hurried on.

"Hey! Fire!" came a cry from the river as Conrad torched the last tent and Weaver smashed a box of tubes and vials that looked like they might contain blood samples.

"Run," Conrad hissed. 

Weaver followed him headlong into the jungle. The yells faded behind them as they ran; hopefully, their presence had gone unnoticed and the Biosyn team was still too distraught by the destruction to venture any guesses as to what had caused it. 

They pressed on until the yells faded completely, and further still, down one canyon and up another. Conrad still led the way, until suddenly he stopped abruptly, raising his rifle. "We've stumbled into a nest," he said. "Back the way we came, quickly."

Weaver turned around, pulling out her pistol. "It's too late for that," she said. "They've got us surrounded." Around them, a hundred or more wolf-sized rodents snarled at them, drawing ever closer. "Rodents are herbivorous, aren't they?"

"Some, but not all," Conrad returned, standing at her back. "These don't look very interested in the grass."

"They don't, do they," Weaver said. "Do you think if we shoot some of them, it will scare the rest off or just make them angrier?"

"I'm not sure, but I think we're going to have to find out," Conrad said. As he spoke, one of the rodents leaped towards him, and he shot it point blank with the rifle, followed by the others that were nearest.

"The question is, are there more of them than we have bullets left?" Weaver said. She shot the eight closest rodents on her side, and scrambled to grab another magazine while the next rodents climbed over the bodies of their predecessors. Behind her, the sound of gunshots varied as Conrad alternated between his rifle and pistol. Weaver emptied another magazine and reloaded once more. She had only one more magazine remaining in her belt pouch.

"Let the dead ones pile up, and maybe that will slow down the living," Conrad said, still standing back to back with her. "I'm almost out. There's more ammo in my pack, but I don't have time to get it."

"I'm running low too," Weaver said. "They're good climbers. I don't think we'll slow them down enough to do much good." She fumbled for her last magazine. "We always knew we were going to die on this island, you know."

"We're not dead yet," Conrad said, but his gunshots were becoming more sporadic, and the rodents were still pouring over the crest of the canyon. "Weaver," he added, urgently. "Weaver!"

"What—" Blackness surrounded her suddenly, and she felt herself being lifted up, out of the canyon, being carried dizzily who-knew-which-way.

"Weaver? Are you all right?" Conrad asked from close by. 

Weaver tucked her empty pistol back in its holster and reached out blindly towards his voice until she touched his arm and could take his hand. "I'm fine," she said. "I'm fine now." She sat there, hand-in-hand with Conrad, and both of them safe in the hand of the island's protector, and despite everything, she couldn't stop smiling.

Kong set them down after a minute or two, on top of a ridge that Weaver suspected might have been the same one that they had climbed up so laboriously two days prior. He stood there, facing them, just like he had faced them twenty years ago. Weaver's hair had gray in it now; she wondered if Kong recognized her. Slowly, she stepped forward, holding out her hand the same as she had done once before, and so many times afterwards in her dreams. Kong stood unmoving, and let her lay her palm gently against his giant nose. "We have to warn him somehow," she said quietly. "How can we make him understand, he has to keep away from the camp on the river."

Conrad stepped up beside her and laid his hand next to hers. "He knows," he said. "I think he's been staying out of sight on purpose. But he knows that they're a danger to him and that we aren't, I feel sure of it."

Weaver listened to Kong's steady breathing, in and out, and felt all her worries fade. She ought to be more fearful for him now, when she knew he was alive and present on the island to be harmed, than before, when she hadn't been certain if he was already gone. But somehow, seeing him, she trusted that he would be all right. He was king around here, after all.

Kong drew back from their touch and regarded them again. Then he reached out that giant hand and picked them up. His palm was dark and damp, and Weaver had never felt safer. Below them, she could hear the sound of Kong's giant footfalls as they covered in minutes the ground they had been trekking over for days. "I don't suppose he knows where our pickup point is," Weaver commented.

"I don't much care if he does," Conrad said beside her. He sounded like he might be smiling. "Wherever Kong wants to take us, I don't mind going."

"A royal invitation," Weaver said, and leaned into Kong's touch.


End file.
